Case Study

MSP Increases Recurring Revenue By 40% With Remote Support Solution

Cohn Consulting is a managed service provider serving small-to-midsized business customers nationwide.

Cohn Consulting Corp., is based in Atlanta, Georgia. The organization was established to provide IT services and automation expertise to serve SMB businesses in the southeastern U.S., and has expanded across the nation and into Europe and India.

The Challenge

When Daniel Cohn formed Cohn Consulting Corp., he was able to make use of familiar technologies to get his IT practice off the ground. In 1996, he joined forces with Jon Czerwinski, Vice President of Operations, to hone in on automating their IT services to meet their clients’ needs.

In 2006, they came across SolarWinds® MSP and found they were able to take their IT automation skills up a notch to better serve their small-to-midsize (SMB) businesses.

With the hectic pace of an SMB practice dictating their every move, Cohn and Czerwinski knew all too well that RMM automation represented the next frontier in IT services. “We saw SolarWinds MSP as a way to lean on our existing automation expertise, while also simplifying our business,” Czerwinski said. “With the MSP N-central® service automation platform, we knew we could produce the same or better results with fewer people on staff.”

The Solution

Using SolarWinds MSP’s Remote Control Manager, the MSP can easily tap into client systems remotely and fix issues wherever the client might be. “With SolarWinds MSP, we’re now able to perform 90 percent of our work remotely,” said Czerwinski.

With several end users located overseas in Europe and India, the Cohn Consulting team must constantly deal with 24/7 global operations and minimal maintenance windows. “Only by leveraging MSP N-central automation can we satisfy those requirements in a cost-effective manner,” said Czerwinski.

“With the MSP N-central direct support feature, we can perform a lot of our support work behind the scenes without interrupting the user,” explains Czerwinski. “This means we don’t have to coordinate time to work on the user’s device, or even wait for a stopping point. Instead, we can speed tickets to faster resolution and then simply reach out to the user to confirm that everything is fixed delivering time savings of at least six minutes per ticket.”

Cohn Consulting has also experienced the advantages of MSP N-central’s tighter integration with Autotask professional service automation (PSA) software. According to Czerwinski, the integration is so solid that engineers can control a significant amount of ticketing completely within MSP N-central – without even having to go into Autotask.

“The granularity with which we can control ticket creation and closure with MSP N-central helps us better manage workloads and shaves off even more time and effort from resolution,” said Czerwinski.

Today, Cohn Consulting serves more than 30 active clients, including engineering firms, legal practices, CPAs and other professionals. Since transitioning from a break/fix model to becoming an MSP, Cohn Consulting has enjoyed steady growth. In the past year alone, the business experienced a 30 percent increase in managed endpoints and a 40 percent increase in recurring revenue – with managed clients now accounting for 75-80 percent of the business.

Newsletter Signup

Get the latest industry news, insights, and analysis delivered to your inbox.